


Quid Pro Quo

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Cardassian Torture, Cruelty, F/M, Hurt Tom Paris, Infidelity, Past Infidelity, Settling scores, Unreliable Narrator, broken Janeway is also my crack, cruel Janeway is my crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:27:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25022368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "That was why she played the other woman so beautifully."A quid pro quo of sorts...
Relationships: Kathryn Janeway/Owen Paris, Owen Paris/Owen Paris' Wife
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30





	Quid Pro Quo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiaCooper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaCooper/gifts).



> This is not beta'd because this is for my beta....and I fired it out in like an hour because I got carried away. It's not arrogance, it's just that no one should beta their own gifts. 
> 
> So the mistakes (and there will be mistakes) are mine. 
> 
> Also, it's so niche that it will likely not to be to the majority of tastes. 
> 
> In my headcanon - though Richard Herd is a lovely man, I am sure - Owen Paris was played by Liam Neeson. Because duh.

* * *

“Admiral Paris,” she rises, pushing her desk chair out as she stands to attention.

If his surprise visit shocks her, she certainly doesn’t let it show.

And it throws him off balance. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting; adulation, desire, fear? But none of those things are apparent in the way she greets him, as if she had been expecting him all along.

“Captain Janeway,” he smiles, and motions to the brand new – as of yet un-sat in – chair in front of her desk. “May I? It’s more of a personal call...”

One finely shaped eyebrow rises a fraction, but she nods her assent as if it’s hers to give. He takes his seat as she returns to hers, and they almost mirror each other.

Almost.

He looks at her for a moment, and she grows tired of his appraisal almost instantly.

“What are you here for Owen?”

She never did pull any punches, and that was – perhaps – what he had most enjoyed about her. That, amongst other things.

“I-“

He realises he doesn’t know how to start, how to ask what he wants to of her. There is so much dark water under this bridge, and he’s not entirely sure – other than that fact he has no choice – that it’s one he should be crossing again.

Again, that was always his conceit.

“You look good Katie.”

Her lip quirks up at one side, and he already regrets his words.

“I know. I tend to go by Kathryn now.”

He was the only one who called her ‘Katie’, apart from Edward.

He adjusts in his seat.

“Owen, I am busy – you know the drill. But more to the point,” her voice doesn’t soften, but it drops to a deadly alto, and he is sure it’s a warning tone she must have grown into. Hard. Hardened. “Your being here invites…” she drums her fingers on her chin for a moment, and then motions to him, “a level of scrutiny I would much rather avoid.”

Pretty metaphors, always the diplomat.

But her warning has sharp little teeth, a warning he reads clearly and without the decorative flair that her words seem to afford it; _not again Owen_.

“I don’t have any other choice,” he says delicately.

“I am sure Julia would disagree.”

Once, a long time ago, she refused to say Julia’s name. She had even hated him saying it.

It seemed to jolt something in her very person, even now as it trips off her tongue with just a shadow of bitterness, with a deliberate attempt at casualness.

He doesn’t blame her.

“Julia doesn’t know I am here,” he admits, because he has no other choice.

Her eyes flash darkly for a moment, and she steeples her fingers and sits back – as if to put even more space between them.

He wants to ask if that’s all that’s left now; fear, fear of him, fear of her past being exposed time and again.

“I need your help,” he says, plainly, wishing this to be over as quickly as possible.

He doesn’t know if she remembers it, but those were the words she used as she lay – raw, naked, legs and ankles bound, blood dripping into black pools on the concrete floor beneath her – on a steel slab and the Cardassians moved, one, and then another, and then another, and then countless more until she stopped asking him.

Until she was silent, and weeping, and staring into his eyes with eyes made of steel.

He doesn’t know what it says about her that it was not that horror which drove them so violently apart, but all the things which followed.

If she remembers, if she knows those are the words burned into his very core, she does not flinch.

Flinching has never been her style.

That was why she played the other woman so beautifully.

She swallows, and leans forward.

“I am not a little girl you can push around anymore Owen.”

As if he ever did.

She wants him to beg, and he supposes he deserves it, though he suspects she knows exactly why he is here. Maybe she was even waiting on it.

And he wonders, for a second, if she is enjoying having this once pompous admiral eating out of her hand…again.

Of course she is.

“It’s about Tom.”

His shame has seeped its way into every crack of HQ, through each deep space station, through the outposts, and then beyond the borders of Federation Space, so there is absolutely no way she has been ignorant to it. Her impassivity would suggest otherwise, and it occurs to him that he has wildly underestimated his opponent.

She is much cleverer than she was even a minute ago.

“Oh?”

She crosses her legs.

“Tom…”he repeats, wildly hoping she will take up the baton.

“Your son?”

She knows fine well who Tom is, she met him a number of times.

He nods.

“I remember him,” she smiles, but it’s deliberate. “He was in your office the day you told me you couldn’t sponsor my dissertation.”

He nods, shame flooding him. Julia had categorically said no, and he was already treading a painfully thin line.

He had given her dissertation to someone else, and it had seemed to hurt her more than their abrupt ending had.

She smiles, but there is no kindness in it.

“Ah. What is it about Tom that you need me to do, Owen?”

“You’ve heard about him…”

She tilts her head to the side, faking curiosity, and the cruelty in her feigned innocence is enough to make him realise what a gargantuan mistake this was. But he’s already waded into this, so he has to get out of the other side.

“No,” she lies.

Just like he lied about her, he supposes, and allowed the salacious half-truths about all of it -bending her over the lovely oak desk in his corner office, having her sleep in his quarters aboard the flagship - spill out into the Admiralty and to every corner of the Federation.

Letting it into her mother’s parochial Indiana living room, into her sister’s studio.

He thought he’d suffered enough at Julia’s hands for that absolute fuck-up, but it seems Kathryn was able to wait even longer.

And now she’s basking in the blinding light of her own patience in the pursuit of revenge.

She is magnificent.

He knows how good it must feel, and he’s also big enough to acknowledge that it’s been a long time coming.

So he swallows, and gives her what she wants:

“Tom, my son. Graduated with honours from the Academy. We have a…difficult relationship. He was under a lot of pressure, made a stupid mistake and falsified records. He was dishonourably discharged.”

He watches the variety of emotions – carefully curated and chosen – play across her beautiful face, and he is appreciative of them because all of them are a façade to cover how much she is enjoying watching him squirm as he retells this.

It makes him want to weep like a little boy.

“He joined the Maquis…but he was picked up on his first patrol. And found guilty of treason. He’s in the penal colonies.”

He sits back, sucks in a breath, as if he’s run a gauntlet.

He has, in a way.

She is watching him the way she used to watch experiments once, aboard _his_ ship: with insatiable hunger, dangerous curiosity. With breathless anticipation of the results.

And it becomes clear to him, in that humiliating moment, that that is all he may be to her – an experiment.

She leaves him hanging, and he’s not sure if she expects him to fill the space that she is letting expand between them.

Finally, she moves and goes to the replicator in the wall. She gets herself a coffee, black, and doesn’t offer him one. He can’t decide if he’s offended or relieved that he isn’t wanted here.

She takes a sip and then moves around the desk to sit in the chair across from him.

He has seen her occasionally over the years, but they have always maintained a polite distance that speaks very much of a past neither of them – though certainly she – does not want to repeat.

Why would she want to? If she wasn’t broken before him, she certainly was after.

And he’s never had the balls to apologise for that.

Now she sits so deliberately near him, so much that his mind is forced to regress into memories he stringently refuses to indulge in.

It is not a mistake on her part, it is a calculation. She isn’t living in the past. No, she is totally absorbed in the present.

She leans in.

“Let me get this straight, Admiral: you want me to ask permission to offer your son a shortened sentence for _treason_ , if I promise to be his babysitter…and he informs me about the whereabouts of the former Commander, Chakotay? Because, of course, after this shakedown, that’s my first mission. Right?”

“Right.”

He nods.

“And you’ll make sure that permission is granted, right?”

She continues, spelling it out to him like he isn’t equipped to understand his own plan.

“Right.”

She sits back, pleased with herself, and takes another drink.

“I don’t owe you anything,” she says after a beat, so softly that he has to strain to hear it.

And for the first time, her emotions shine in her eyes.

Hurt, embarrassment.

Hard fury.

He wants to curl in on himself, and his own absolute arrogance brought him straight to this punishment. 

He deserves every aching indignity of it. 

“No, you don’t.”

She nods, and turns her face away.

There is a moment of silence before he admits defeat, at least to himself.

He stands to go, but he turns to her.

Even though all of it is shattered glass and needles, he will always have a soft spot for her. He wanted her to do well, once upon a time.

That has always been his problem.

“Chakotay isn’t a bad man. He served as my tactical officer a few years before he defected. You’ll like him,” he says, the Admiral again.

“Go easy on him, he’ll come easily if he sees he can trust you. You’ve got this, you’re ready for it.”

She looks up as his speech comes to an end.

“I know I am.”

She isn’t going to give him anything, and he has no right to ask.

He sees it for the dismissal it is and promptly decides its time to take his leave. He has not gotten what he came for, and he may even have lost something by coming here.

“Admiral?”

He turns on his heels, to see her standing at the raised platform of her own Ready Room, her back to him as she looks out into the stars.

“I don’t owe you anything,” she repeats, without turning. “But I owe it to your family, and to your son. I know what it does to children.”

“He doesn’t know who you are,” he says, too quickly not to sound desperate.

Tom knows what he did, but Owen has never told him her name. It always felt like just another betrayal.

“I don’t _ever_ want him to know,” she says, and her voice hitches on an emotion he does not recognise. Perhaps it is because she won’t look at him. “Quid pro quo?”

“Yes Captain.”

He wants to go to her and wrap her in his arms and say ‘Thank you Katie’ into her red hair.

But before he can do any of that, he should apologise.

And she will never allow that.

She turns and nods her assent.

“All the best on your first mission. I have no doubt it will be a roaring success,” he says, softly, the way he would have if he hadn’t lost her somewhere along the line.

She smiles, and there is a flash of the past, a shine of the present, and a glimmer of the future in it.

“You should expect nothing less.”


End file.
